Tag: Social

It’s a Mean Old World

The first time I heard that was from an unlikely source. Decades ago I had a client who was an elderly Jewish widow. She had all kinds of money, owned a condominium in the same building as Elton John in Buckhead, Atlanta. She and her husband had worked hard and been successful so I couldn’t understand why she had that outlook on life. Then one day I was at her home and her son stopped by. He was in his fifties I would guess and was permanently crippled from polio, which he had contracted as a child. I began to see how she might think the world was mean if she had seen him suffer, both physically, and in other ways from going through life with a disability. He, like my parents, was born before the polio vaccine was invented. None of my immediate relatives ever contracted it, but neither my mom nor my dad ever learned to swim because of the danger when they were growing up. I never found out any more about my client’s son’s story. All the money in the world could not cure what polio had done to him during childhood.

A lot of years have passed since I heard my elderly friend make that comment and for the most part I had forgotten it, being an optimist I guess because so many kind things have happened to me I tend to take the good in people for granted. But here lately it does seem like the world has gotten meaner. We’re all shouting at each other, cursing and threatening to kill each other over the slightest thing. I know social media has caused most of it, the more we give into our emotions online, the better our chances of going viral, which seems to be everyone’s goal these days. We can now vent our frustrations to the world. As I recall, pre-internet that was something I would only do with my closest friends and family and in private. Now it’s become the norm to show our worst selves to the world at large. And where a friend or family member would listen and try to calm our negative emotions, now once it goes viral there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. The media companies themselves, but we all know that isn’t going to happen, not in a million years.

So there we are. Yes, there’s lots of good things going on but what gets the most attention in all of our media is the ugly, the frightening, the worst. Maybe that little old lady was right, it is a mean old world after all. Too bad because most people are really basically good. I still believe that, in spite of how it looks online.

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Project Liberty

I read an article today about a new service that seeks to create an altogether different Internet. The inventors of the current model say it’s fundamentally flawed. It’s design allows a few tech giants to gather up everyone’s data and use it without consent or even knowledge that it’s being done. They say that it can never be fixed because of the way it was built and the only solution is to start over. I agree wholeheartedly.

I remember when the Internet first came into use. I was thrilled with all of the amazing things it was going to bring into our lives. And in many ways it has. I currently work from home which could not happen without it. I check out many websites on a weekly or even daily basis for updates. But outside these places that I feel fairly confident of I no longer have much faith in the authenticity of what I’m seeing. And this is before the full implementation of AI. Just think what can of worms that’s going to open up. Very soon you will not be able to trust anything you see online. The ability to gather up data and manipulate it to fit whatever model is in vogue at the time will overwhelm the internet.

One thing I know, having worked in the tech field for almost twenty five years, is you do not want the current group of tech wizards to be in charge of anything. They are brilliant in many ways but they are also not and most likely never will be adults. It’s as though we’ve given the keys to the universe to a group of teenage boys who have no more moral aptitude than you would expect of a smart ass sixteen year old. You keep hoping to see some glimmer of responsibility beginning to appear but it never does. There’s too much money blinding them to what their success is really about. Part of it, a large part, was being at the right place at the right time. Some deliberately positioned themselves there but others were just the lucky ones. Their adolescent egos will never let them admit that nor will adversity ever cause them to stop and re-evaluate.

The damage done to society by the digital garbage in our online environment may turn out to be as devastating as the plagues of the dark ages. No one knows what’s true anymore so they choose what they want to believe and once started the internet provides justification for any and every point of view. We rush headlong into the abyss of our worst nightmares. That’s what the current version of the internet is providing us, a way to make almost anything we can imagine seem real. Don’t for a moment think that the boys behind all of this will have any qualms at all about using any and every device they know of to get you to click. True or false, right or wrong, makes absolutely no difference. Getting you to click is the only thing that matters.

Unless we drop their version of the internet and adopt a new one that is built on principles of privacy and trust. Check out Project Liberty. I hope we all live to see it flourish.

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United we stand

Working as a technical contractor a few years ago I was offered a position working for a major computer company doing a refurbish of computer equipment inside the patient rooms and at nurse’s stations at one of our best hospitals. I completed all of the forms required for employment but before I could begin work I had to have a current MMR vaccine, for the prevention of measles, mumps and rubela. Without the vaccine I could not take the job.

When I was a child we had to have a polio vaccination to attend public school. Before the vaccine was available children did not go swimming. My mother never learned to swim because they weren’t allowed to go in the water when she was growing up, the risk of contracting polio was too great.

When traveling abroad as a teenager I had to carry proof of vaccinations, not to travel but to return to the United States. I still have the booklet with all of my ‘shots’ listed in it, filled out by my pediatrician.

So vaccinations are nothing new, but the outcry against them is. I happen to have family members who follow a religious practice that does not rely on medicine for healing. Even those devout family members took vaccinations when required to, for school attendance or to enter the army during WWII. And I can tell you positively that there are not enough truly religions objections to make up the numbers of vaccination protesters, those religious groups are, and always have been, very small in the US, thousands but certainly not millions of followers. It would be very easy to check, the churches keep records of those who attend. If that happened you would find that most of the so-called ‘religious objectors’ have never attended a church whose beliefs would cause them to forego medical treatment.

So what it boils down to is that we just don’t want to be told what to do, that we don’t trust our government to govern us. That is a real shame and I suspect that right now there is no one on earth that most Americans would trust, except maybe Santa Claus. Which pretty much sums up the national status right now, we are all acting like a bunch of children. Whenever we have faced crisis before we have done it together, as a nation. After 9/11, people were kind to total strangers, there was a sense of ‘us’ and not ‘us and them’. Now, we are fighting each other when we need to get together and fight the enemy, which is a disease that is causing major disruptions to our society. If we get rid of the disease we move forward, everyone gets back to work, the supply chain heals and the good things in life that we enjoy in such abundance are restored to us. That has always been the great thing about America, is that now matter how different we are, we are united.

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Attention

It’s a sad state of affairs when world leader’s first priority is to grab
the world’s attention. They want to be in the spotlight, as though that is an
accomplishment in and of itself. Is this some new game? Like charades? We see
one get lots of media time and immediately another one will do or say something
dangerous or controversial, grabbing up all of the news coverage. One-upmanship
to see who can be talked about the most. Who can get the most ‘likes’ or ‘shares’,
as though that was hard. One click isn’t much of an effort if you ask me. What
is hard, is tackling a few of the many issues our countries are facing, like
internet security, economic stability and public health. How about curing
cancer or finding a way to travel fast enough that space becomes the new
frontier. We are fast using up this planet, if we don’t figure out how to go
elsewhere soon things could get very ugly here.

Before the age of the internet you actually had to actually do
something to get your name posted all over the news. Like landing on the moon,
and returning back home safely. That was news. It was worthy of our attention.
Now all we have is a lot of huffing and puffing and very little or nothing to
show for it. Like the country song, what we all need is a little less talk and
a lot more action. I would say a lot less talk.

 

 

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This is one App you do not need

Recently I’ve heard advertisements on radio and television for an insurance company app that ‘lets you prove you’re a good driver’. OK, I guess some people would take that bait. You might know you’re a good driver if you don’t have accidents, or haven’t had a ticket for a moving violation in several years.

But who would be foolish enough to download an app that tracks everything your car does. How long you idle, your speed, and believe me, applications these days also know the posted speed limit. My company uses a similar application to ‘watch’ it’s employees who drive company cars. In case no one else has noticed, most Americans don’t drive the speed limit, either in the city or on the interstate, or along county backroads. I know because I’m the one causing the bottle neck on two lane roads by driving the speed limit. Putting an app like this on your phone is like getting your insurance agent to drive with you everywhere you go. And while they’re tracking the car, are they also tracking where you go? Do you stay out late at night, or go through areas of town with a high crime rate? I’m sure that would bump up your insurance payments if you did. Say you get a job promotion and now have to park downtown. Up goes your insurance because the chances your car will be vandalized have just shot up from when you parked in an open lot in the suburbs. Did you want to spend your hard earned raise on insurance? Once you get the app, I suspect it will be very difficult to get rid of it, possibly penalties and fees will be involved

I strongly suspect that putting this application on your phone will NOT lower your insurance rates, and the chances your rates will go up are much greater than they will go down. More importantly, if we aren’t careful every move we make is going to be watched and recorded by somebody. Fakebook and Giggle already have us pegged, it’s a trend that needs to stop. Just don’t do it.

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Fakebook

I used to check Facebook at least once a day. While I never installed the app on my phone, I checked in every morning to see what friends and family were up to. Occasionally I posted something to my homepage, but not very often. I am a reluctant social media user.

But last fall while waiting in line at a movie theatre concession stand the service was so amazingly horrible I wondered if I could set up a dummy Facebook account in the time it took to place my order. Sadly, I could. I made up a name and gave a fake birthday, nothing about it was true, just to see if I could do it, then left a scathing review of the theatre’s customer service. After the movie, which was the latest JK Rowling Fantastic Beasts, I forgot about the dummy account. And since I signed off of my real account several months ago when it became increasingly clear that Facebook has no concern for it’s members other than having the ability to sell their data to the highest bidder, I didn’t think anything about Facebook again until a few weeks ago. Then I remembered the fake account on my phone and thought I should try to delete it. So I logged back into it and there were all of the suggested ‘friends’ the program had chosen for me. Almost all of them were from the church I go to, who are already friends on my ‘real’ account. I figured this was obvious since Facebook tracks where I go, it would assume that I would know members of my church. But then the strangest thing happened. All of this data that’s collected is supposed to be anonymous, they say it can’t really track YOU, just your data. But there in the list of suggested ‘friends’ was a real friend of mine whom I haven’t seen in several years and who lives in another city. I am absolutely certain that I am the only human being who knows both the people from my church and this particular person who has no connection with the church or this city at all. Without entering a shred of truth about my real identity, the application had recognized me. Needless to say, I was shocked because I thought anonymous meant just that. As I said, I never installed the app on my phone and only checked my Facebook account, the real one, from my computer at home. A further nail in the coffin of my Facebook account. I prefer to think of it as Fakebook. Oh, the way it was able to sort me from the fake account was real enough, but other than that, there is no verification of what is posted. Only your identity, where you go, who you talk to?, what you buy, who knows what they are tracking. And what you choose to say online is beside the point. The only thing Fakebook is interested in is your data. That’s where all of the money lies. I have a friend, from the same church that it recognized, who says she doesn’t care that she is being tracked. But this is not truly realizing the danger that these programs pose to our society. All of us are being watched, and not just real time, but our past, everything we do is being recorded through these apps that we so willingly install on our phones, and if Fakebook had their way, would control every interaction we have with anyone. If the government tried to do this people would be up in arms, but we are so naïve we are welcoming it, even paying for devices that spy on us. Are we really so desperate for the sad semblance of human interaction that social media really is, that we are willing to sell every bit of information about ourselves to get it?

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Elephant in the Room

What no one ever talks about is population growth. That’s the real issue we are facing. Instead of placing all our hopes on technology saving us from ourselves why not do the sensible thing and begin to reduce the human population. After all the really big problems facing us are due to too many human beings living on this planet. Already we need chemical fertilizers to produce enough food to feed us. There isn’t enough arable land to support the billions of people living now, not to mention what the population may be in decades to come. Yet, it is never mentioned as something we need to address. China did have their one child policy for several years with the unintended consequence that only boy children were saved, one way or the other. Of course, a shrinking population scares the pants off of any capitalist economics gurus, it doesn’t appear to work without unlimited new consumers.

Of course I am suggesting that this is a voluntary endeavor. If people were educated to understand how having more and more children strains the resources of the planet perhaps they would think twice about having more than two children per couple. Some might choose not to have any children at all or just one child. I suspect that the result would be a turning point for civilization. Never before have human beings voluntarily chosen to restrict their own personal desire for the good of civilization as a whole. I would not want this to be mandated since I hope that we are intelligent enough a species, and have enough self-control to manage it without outside enforcement.

I used to dream that space travel would provide a means of mass exodus from the earth, leaving plenty of habitat for the rest of the species on the planet. But it doesn’t appear to be happening fast enough to save the earth and possibly us with it.

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